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First time accepted submitter Vorknkx writes "I work in a small ISP. Most of our customers have cable modems but some of them are using Canopy or Ubiquity products. To manage all that, we're using a number of programs and solutions not necessarily made for such a task that are kept up to date simply using copy and paste. We have an Access database for all our internet customers, an Excel document for our wireless users, The Dude to monitor every user and a custom-made web application to monitor traffic. Needless to say, we're starting to hit the limit and juggling between all these programs is a complete pain. Is there some kind of all-in-one solution that would allow us to eliminate all the copy and paste while keeping the same functionality?"

Just build yourself a LAMP setup, with workers feeding a database, and web GUI to access/update.Sync data from other sources into that, to provide a single converged view of whatever item (customer, router, location, network link...whatever). (Don't forget copious use of memcache btw)

Trust me....this works really well and scales to millions of customers:-)

Just build yourself a LAMP setup, with workers feeding a database, and web GUI to access/update.
Sync data from other sources into that, to provide a single converged view of whatever item (customer, router, location, network link...whatever). (Don't forget copious use of memcache btw)

Trust me....this works really well and scales to millions of customers:-)

Rancid [shrubbery.net] is arguably the contemporary equivalent. At the user end, you get all the convenience of revision control and versioning for your configurations; but the actual 'make-it-so' layer that turns the configuration you define into a properly configured device is handled in the background by a scripted process that logs in, makes config changes, collects data, and so on.

It is mostly aimed at fancier switches, rather than cheapie endpoint devices; but adding device support through modules is doable and migh

Seriously, just because you can manage a "ten item list" in an Excel sheet doesn't make it a proper tool for running a CRM with at least hundreds of users in it. If you want to use the CRM to manage modems, or at least IP traffic, you'll be looking at something special already. Managing services like e-mail, home pages and whatever else you choose to provide is is another thing.

I've spent ten in the last fifteen years or so working for ISPs and I haven'

At the very least a base install will give you some billing software and hooks for other automation. It wouldn't hurt to drop them a line, at any rate.

disclaimer: I used to work for obsidian ~6 years ago. they're a small company, but full of bright people and they have a lot of experience in the area. if jet isn't for you i have no doubts they can at least give you some honest advice on what to look

I suggest you get either MySQL or MSSQL to manage your contacts before you find yourself wishing you had put all that data on a real database.

The problem with your suggestion (and you are not alone in this discussion) is comparing Access, which does both application development as well as a database back end, to a pure database back end. With MySQL or MSSQL you woiuld need to add an application development platform as well.

As they already use access, it is pretty simple to move the back end to MSSQL if they need more scalability. The front end (application) can stay in Access.

Yes and no. Cable TV (excluding the communication back to the headend for VOD or SDV) is one way. This means the traffic flows to your home. HSI is two-way communications (your both recieving and sending). So tools that can look at the downstream certainly apply to Video & HSI however return is pretty much exclusive to the HSI side.

So, you have an access database to track your Internet customers, and an Excel sheet tracking wireless customers.

Why? How did this come into being? Who thought two different solutions to essentially the same issue were a good idea? Or did no one notice? Why haven't you consolidated these (preferably in the database? Did no one know how to make that work?

I'm not trying to cast aspersions on the technical chops of people I've never met. Maybe there are really good reasons you have the solution you have.

Check out www.Powercode.com which is a per user per month software platform that does it all. A good free alternative is www.freeside.biz which can do it all as well but will require more effort on your part and comes with no bells and whistles.

This is time for a small, custom-written bit of software. Put together a rough list of your requirements, ask around for recommendations, and contact a couple of programming houses. Heck, contact a local university and talk to them about student projects - sometimes that's not a bad way to go for a small application.

Your requirements are unusual, and aren't going to be covered well by off-the-shelf software. Professional quality custom programming will cost thousands of dollars. So what? How much is this go

There are commercial apps for ISPs to manage customers. When I worked for a dial-up/isdn/t1 service provide about 12 years ago, we used Platypus.

We used it both for customer service / billing and technical support. It had a windows client and a web client and used Microsoft SQL server on the backend.

Even a help desk software package could help. The great thing about Platypus is that it could handle all the credit card and billing stuff too. You might also look at HEAT or Remedy for just keeping a customer database and doing tech support.

From my POV, Platypus was a never ending nightmare of various implementation and migration problems, a horrifying fat client, and a basically worthless web app. Hopefully it's better now, since they're still in business, but it's not something I would recommend except for avoidance.

I was in your position some years ago. I also know that our main operator wasted millions in Incognito software just to throw it away, and ended up paying millions to Microsoft. Obvious not the average "small ISP", but I hope you get across my point. Small/medium ISPs end up writing their own custom software, because there is not a specialized/vertical package that works as it should. I ended up doing that too, and connecting my software to a in-house developed ERP package.
Check my profile in linked.in.
Regards,
http://pt.linkedin.com/pub/rui-ribeiro/16/ab8/434/ [linkedin.com]

PHP my well be good for some of the frontend, specially if you are a SMALL ISP. however it is no good for the hard work. And mind you, there may be frontend solutions to administer some of this services, however they themselves do not and cannot run in PHP (although I honestly believe it is a typo of yours). Regards

Depends on how big you guys really are, you say small but to me a small isp is less than 50k subscribers. If you're much smaller than this then you have more options. Anyway there aren't a lot of good drop in solutions for monitoring thousands of devices unless you're planning on spending a ton of money. Easiest way to roll a cable modem monitoring system (Note: I have personal experience doing this for ~5 million subscribers) is to build a database (MySQL/etc) and then create a collection script in perl/php/other scripting language that collects your cable modem ip addresses directly from the CMTS. Your script will log directly into the cmts execute 'show cable modem' or appropriate command for the platform your using and you will log all this information into your database. Your second script will use SNMP to collect statistics from those logged cable modem ip addresses. Things you'll want to collect would be the transmit, receive, downstream snr, upstream snr, interface statistics, etc. Once you have this information then you can put together a webpage that will present the data with nice graphs that give you a good idea of what's going on. This same script can act as a monitoring system to collect modem state changes or you can use a trap system like Nagios to just catch the alarms the CMTS can be configured to kick out. Good luck!

Forgot to mention. the goal with the collection scripts is to tie them to a cron job that runs like every 5-30 mins. This makes it all automatic and and as you add new subscribers the script then auto updates your information for you.

I write what you are describing for two ISPs with roughly 10,000 customers in the past. Of course you want to have a log of your modem signals to ascertain customers problems, and then, maybe a page where you input the MAC or name of customer, and you have got the current SNR whatever signals. You also want to collect netflow stats if you are billing bandwidth over usage. I wrote everything in C in the past, and someone wrote the PHP interface. In the last gig, I also wrote the web interface, the PHP interf

I wrote a customer billing, administrative, ticketing and sales system for a small ISP (that ended up growing into a larger hosting company). The system integrated with the email server, RADIUS server, vendor ticketing systems a web portal for clients, had it's own inventory tracking system, IP allocation tool and managed the sales process from lead to quote to billable account. It is definitely doable to write your own but keep in mind that this does require some commitment of resources to not only writ

Well, he said they are growing. So, who knows where they will be in 2 - 5 years. I am sure they don't and none of us have a crystal ball.

The question should be, whats their strategy? you know.. the usual... where do you want to be in 5 years? how will you want to get there? and whats the catch?

So, if the answer came back... " We want to be the largest ISP in the country. We are sitting on a pile of cash and plan to out spend everyone else. The problem is are as stupid as the stuff pigs play in". Then some

In a volatile market with constantly changing legislation and a chance that a major player who can undercut you on price at loss until you go out of business will enter your particular area? Not so much.

I work at a small ISP. We're a decade past your point, but our wired-building model means we're still sitting on less than 5000 customers.
We run Ispconfig and use the commercial support while upgrading, that hosting server paid for itself many times over and continues to be great value to us.
For network monitoring we started with mrtg on a solaris box, manually configured *shudder*. Since moving to JFFNMS we've been very happy with the network-monitoring side of things.
I think you'd do well to follow

This.you don't need a one solution to all your issues, find solutions that improve each area and create an easy way to access those systems / pull data and aggregate it for your use. I come from Comcast (definitely not small) and they use so many different systems for network monitoring. Allot the data is pulled into a custom built solution for the tech support (grand slam previously, now moving to Einstein), BMW remedy for ticketing (grand slam and Einstein feed into this), custom comtrac and csg for bill

do it right, and use NAGIOS...It is a pain in the ass in the beggining, however if you have minimum scripting ability and SNMP knowledge , you can virtually monitor everything.

I do, I have about 10k services on about 900 hosts in 20 countries monitored

Doesn't give me a real time network graph though. I have command line snmp scripts showing bits/second which I can run against key troublespots, but a real time map of inter-site connections and exit points is a useful tool, especially as I want to add another 100 sites strung together by VPNs and occasional leased lines in a mesh

Honestly, if you are already performing all these tasks manually and have a "working system", you would likely be better off completing your build with scripting to finish automating all the processes and completing central data storage in a database package.

1) Enlarge your Access system to encompass all functionality. I've written deeper managed systems in Access (and some are still in use, LOL) which is fully capable of handling all the necessary tasks with appropriate scripting. But when you get large

You could use any of those two CRM's, with SugarCRM being more mature than X2Engine, as well as having a pretty good development studio built into the CRM. This allows you to create custom modules, with custom fields & forms. That's what you might use to manage equipment inventories for example.

You can also use hooks in the code, to call various API's to provision services. For example if a customer is assigned a new product, you can hook that event to make something happen in the real world.

Before our small ISP smalled-out, we were converting to FreeSide [freeside.biz], a FOSSy sol'n, from WinNT-based Platypus. Had all the goods for user self-provisioning (RADIUS and such), billing, reporting; Nice perly hooks for places you needed a more custom fit.

My opinion is that your requirements are unique, and any software package in existence will only do 80% of what you need. You have two choices - put together a couple of these 80% packages with some scripting glue, or write something bespoke from the bottom up. I would favour the former probably, since then when your programmer leaves you will have a better chance to get someone else who can easily find out how the whole thing works.

I recently helped a small wireless ISP get started, and one of the first things we did was put together a management application. It's grown to be moderately large, but a lot of the functionality required can be constructed from various free sources. My client is chugging away nicely with a Java-based (server-side) system, although it could have been written in any one of a large number of languages - Java was convenient for the available skill-set in the company [never overlook the value of using an enviro

It's not terribly clear what exactly you're trying to accomplish, but have a good look at NetDisco (designed for college campuses, mostly for tracking MAC addresses & the devices that know about them) and NetDot (designed more generically for wide-area networks but not so much for tracking end stations). They're both excellent pieces of software that keep track of everything on your network for you in a clean multivendor way. I particularly like NetDot as it has the much-sought-after feature of a plug

Without the time and resources to do it right the answer is simply no. You would have to write it on your own. I owned and operated a small ISP with dialup, DSL, and 4 different flavors of wireless. there exisits no central management tool. You're best bet is to find a decent customer front end product for billing, ticketing, etc probably a commericail product would be best. Then use open source products to monitor your network(s). Either way you will have to do some glueing together of things as sta

I second this comment. Been there, done that. Dont try to write it in one go, try to devise a module/plug-in architecture, and write small modules as you need them (customer automation one module/modem stats another/DHCP bookkeeping another one...you get the gist). Divide it in projects, and write your modules over time as work load permits. Or hire someone.

I own a small provisioning company called RPM Provisioning Management (www.rpmcable.com) and offer DOCSIS and Wireless provisioning and monitoring software. I operate several very large wireless grids using StarOS and Mikrotik equipment. I don't have much experience with Canopy, but do have a lot of experience with Ubiquiti. We should be able to come up with an acceptable solution for you. Take a look at our site and shoot me an e-mail if you'd like some more information. Thanks and good luck!

I suggest looking into the Bilt application: http://buildadatabaseapp.com/ [buildadatabaseapp.com]
It's a fairly easy to extend system built for creating adhoc shared database applications without having to write any code. You could use a bit of custom PHP on top of it to integrate into whatever public forms or whatever you need to pull data from. All your operators and employees would only need to interact with the UI provided by Bilt.

Take a look at Wispmon. It does Wireless Customer Qualification, CRM, Provisioning with any equipment, workorders, trouble tickets, billing (recurring and usage based), and has mobile apps that provide utilities to your field techs. It was designed by a couple of guys who ran a WISP for 8 years to solve just the problem you are having. www.wispmon.com